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So many of these top ten lists put Los Angeles in a bad light. Not today. The magazine Foreign Policy has named L.A. the 7th most global city, placing us in a club with New York City, Chicago, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.
"So what makes a Global City? Not size alone, that's for sure; many of the world's largest megalopolises, such as Karachi (60), Lagos (59), and Kolkata (63), barely make the list," explains FP. "Instead, the index aims to measure how much sway a city has over what happens beyond its own borders -- its influence on and integration with global markets, culture, and innovation."
Los Angeles' most obvious world influence is Hollywood, which the magazine says "last year earned a record $29.9 billion in box-office revenue -- about equal to Kenya's entire GDP."
But with so much talk of urbanism and density -- we definitely hear that a lot in Los Angeles -- Joel Kotkin of Chapman University in Orange County, also writing in FP, wonders if suburbia is actually the answer.
As unfashionable as it might sound, what if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration? Instead of overcrowded cities rimmed by hellish new slums, imagine a world filled with vibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?
In once sense, some of the smaller cities around Los Angeles do work wonders with their lean staffs. Traffic flows, they institute progressive yet real working solutions and they actually effectively communicate with their residents. In another sense, some of those same cities lack any sort of mature culture and life.